Smush it! image optimization

by Michael Whitaker on October 4, 2008

I have had the pleasure of listening to Nicole Sullivan recently about website performance optimization and the impact it has on the bottom line. Read her blog.

Nicole and her teammate Stoyan have now released a very cool Firefox extension called smush! it that downloads the images on a webpage, smushes them (ie reduces their file size) and zips them all up. Just upload those optimized images back to your website or Yahoo! Store.

Even if you think that everyone has broadband, the lighter you can make your pages the better. Some of the biggest Yahoo! Stores have very heavy page weights (we are taking in some case megabytes, not kilobytes).

I cannot imagine the increase in business they’ll get if they use this tool to optimize their images. Here is an example of the homepage analysis of an Internet Retailer 500 store:

Smush1042008_120956_pm

Get the extention at www.SmushIt.com

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

amitai October 5, 2008 at 5:31 am

main way of optimizing the images is turning them into PNG’s… how does yahoo work with PNG images? from past experience it had some problems…

Friedbeef October 13, 2008 at 6:35 pm

Sounds like a good idea. Wish there was a Wordpress Plugin which would auto smush all existing images on the site and put it back where it was :)

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